From The Eye Between the Worlds (KQ7 Authorized Guide)
From The Eye Between the Worlds wa Part Three of the King's Quest VII Authorized Players Guide. It was later adapted into Chapter 13 of the The King's Quest Companion, 4th Edition as From The Eye Between the Worlds: Compiled from Messages to This World form the World of Daventry, as Sent by Derek Karlavegen. Background From the Eye between the Worlds suggests that The Princeless Bride is a most curious piece of work as it purports to be the telling of actual and true events. Is it? One has to make up your own mind after reading or playing it, and Derek Karlavaegen's missive. The universe is much stranger than we imagine.KQ7AG, pg vii From The Eye Between the Worlds Since we gave up being paranoid about this several years ago, we'll lay out the facts plainly and bloodlessly. If you consider us crazy, or odd, or perpetrators of cheap fiction after reading this, it will be quite understandable. We, too, thought the same thing about ourselves once. In the latter part of the 1980s we began receiving some very curious electronic mail. The messages purported to be histories, chronicles, news clippings, and articles form a place named Daventry, a place we knew only existed in computer games. The sender of these pieces describing himself as a wandering writer of current events and an amateur wizard. His name, he claimed, was Derek Karlavaegen. One day, while nosing around the deserted home of the wizard Manannan, Derek discovered what he described as a metal head with 100 teeth and a single, great, glass eye. After much tinkering, he could make words wiggle across the eye and, after time, found words appearing there without his doing anything at all. From all we can reconstruct, it appears that Derek discovered some sort of computer in the magician's study and somehow stumbled his way into cyberspace --- our word, but a shared reality. Derek calls his strange metal head the Eye between the Worlds. Assuming that he had found a link between his universe and ours, Derek began sending out material that he had either written, found interesting, or thought we might enjoy. He says he has no idea if anyone receives what he puts out but finds pleasure in the act. The connection in his opinion, is one-way. We just happen to be on the other end. After years of searching for some hoaxter and finding none; upgrading computers and changing modems; and an irregular, but continuing, flow of mail, we have been left with but one conclusion. Derek and Daventry are real. Derek tells an intriguing tale. Once magic and the fantastic walked the earth alongside the ordinary. Elves, dragons, giants, and mermaids were as real to us as a full stomach or a good knife. But we humans started to draw away from that side of reality and began believing numbers more than faerie dust. Cities grew and people multiplied. Finally, a great gathering of all mystical, magical, and extraordinary beings --- fearful of extinction, extermination or scorn --- decided to m ake a place for themselves. A new place. They cast a great spell and withdrew from our world. They created their own world and named it Daventry. Except for our myths, folklore, and legends, we have forgotten them. They have never forgotten us. Derek claims that our two universes are so close that we can dream each other. And this is the real reason he sends us what he does. He has discovered mentions and snatches "King's Quest" in his searches through the aether. He was startled to find that the games, as far as he could determine, are accurate retellings of events he knows to be true in his world. "Only a great dreamer," he writes, "can dream such dreams to tell such tales. We only dream of you as whispers of absurdity and fast flashes of frightful facts and factories, blind to the multiverse around you. Although he has given no evidence of knowing her name, Derek claims Roberta Williams, the creator of what we assume are King's Quest games is such a great dreamer. Roberta says she just makes up the stories, but she has not denied that she dreams them. But the stories she creates, and the events Derek relates, are just too, too to be coincidental. We merely take Derek's information and incorporate it into our books on King's Quest, hoping others will realize that there is more to reality than we can see, measure or classify. What we have related above, and a great deal more, has been told in greater deatail in another of our books, The King's Quest Companion (Osborne, McGraw-Hill, 1992). If you look there, you can see just how closely Derek Karlavaegen's and Roberta Williams' versions of the happenings in Daventry match through the first six games of the series, the first 20 years or so of the reign of King Graham. Recently, however, I received a long missive from Derek. It consisted of two parts; the first was a lengthy narration, more a romance than anything else, which Derek claims is wildly popular among the readers of "popular gossiping and literary trifles." It is said to be an anonymous telling of a secret story concerning Queen Valanice and Princess Rosella of Daventry and the dangers they faced during an attempted kidnapping of Rosella by the king of the trolls and her subsequent rescue. The story also claims that the princess is considering marriage to a prince who has spent his entire life, with the exception of but a few days, ensorcelled as something other than himself, never knowing his true nature or identity. This, of course reads a lot like the happenings of King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride. But unlike his other messages to our world, Derek cautions us about the veracity of the tale, thinking it more fancy than fact. More fiction than history as he knows it. And he concludes on an even more fascinating note, which is where we will leave you: :...yet, while I am privileged to be close to Alexander, his parents, and sister --- my pardon, King Alexander; it is a title which I still find an awkward one for my friend --- I have heard nothing of such a possible marriage. Rumor, or popular fabrication is possible. The mass hope for another royal wedding, manifesting itself as a true romance, is another conceivable explanation for the widespread and uncritical acceptance of the tale. :Rosella may be impetuous, but she is no fool. She would marry no man before her time, and she knows near nothing of Edgar. The queen may be warm hearted and full of kindness towards all, but when Rosella was to be sacrificed to the fire dragon, Valanice guarded her daughter's door with naked sword as her protectress. She would not be so easily swayed from her course of rescue in Etheria as the narrative asserts. :The tale could be true, all is possible, but it rings wrong for me. I have another explanation, one which suits my misgivings and, at the same time, brings our universes closer together. :Here, in Daventry, we are always recreating ourselves. The great dreamer in your world, the Other World as we call it, creates tales and fables from what is our reality, our histories. I think there is a great dreamer here now, too; one who has dreamed the fiction of your universe and is creating new realities and histories for us. :Our universes are so close together that we dream each other. We exist right over each others shoulders, if we could only turn fast enough we might see each other. :And now we dream of you." Behind the scenes There are two versions of this article a more complete and extended version in the 4th Edition Companion, and a version in which Peter Spear interjects his own theories in KQ7 Authorized Guide, as well as took the time to summarize Derek Karlavaegen's backstory. References Category:Articles Category:Original Canon Category:KQ7